If you enjoyed this talk, consider joining the Molecular Modeling and Drug Discovery (M2D2) talks live: https://valence-discovery.github.io/M...

Abstract: One of the challenges with deep learning is lack of model interpretability. This is a significant drawback in the chemistry domain as lack of knowledge why a certain prediction was made dissuades chemists to trust predictions from deep learning. In this work we propose a method that can provide local explanations for arbitrary models with the use of molecular counterfactuals. These are sparse explanations composed of molecular structures. A counterfactual is an example as close to the original, but with a different outcome. Although relatively new to AI, counterfactual explanations are a mature topic in philosophy and mathematics. We use counterfactuals to answer, “what is the smallest change to the features that would alter the prediction". Our Molecular Model Agnostic Counterfactual Explanations (MMACE), method is built on the STONED (Nigam et al., 2021) algorithm to traverse a local chemical space around a given base molecule to identify counterfactuals. Further, we introduce an open-source software named “exmol” that implements the MMACE algorithm for generating counterfactual explanations.  

Speaker:  Geemi Wellawatte - https://geemi725.github.io/  

Twitter Prudencio: https://twitter.com/tossouprudencio  

Twitter Therence: https://twitter.com/Therence_mtl  

Twitter Cas: https://twitter.com/cas_wognum  

Twitter Valence Discovery: https://twitter.com/valence_ai